Author: socialistinvestor

Russia has asked China for military equipment, and perhaps other help, in its war against Ukraine:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-asks-china-for-military-help-in-war-with-ukraine-u-s-officials-say/

What can this mean? Does Russia really need military equipment?

Or is Putin testing the waters, trying to see whether China will help Russia evade sanctions?

Whatever Putin’s motivation, this is a natural experiment which may reveal the motivations and thinking of China’s leaders.

One hypothesis about China is that it is not a pure example of billionaire capitalism, although heaven knows it has plenty of billionaires. Because China’s prosperity depends on manufacturing, which implies a middle class composed of managers, engineers, accountants, skilled workers and sub-contractors, its predominant socialization must be realistic, honest, and generally cooperative. No manufacturing sector can exist without those values. However authoritarian and corrupt the government may be, there is an indispensable part of society which is (perhaps passively, even unconsciously) opposed to that authoritarianism and corruption.

It may be possible to test this hypothesis by China’s response to Putin’s cry for help. Will China throw Putin a lifeline? On the merits of the case, I would say no. If you or I were in Xi’s shoes, would we do Putin any big favors? Favors that Putin will, in all likelihood, be unable (or unwilling) to re-pay?

Sure, Xi might be willing to help a little, just to placate a neighbor, but what is Xi’s underlying attitude to Putin and Putin’s regime in Russia? He doesn’t seem to mind if Putin puts pressure on the Americans or Europe, but does Xi want a stronger and more aggressive Russia on his northern border? Does he actually want Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to succeed? He most likely does not—but if he does, that tells us something.

If I were Xi I would see Putin as an unpredictable neighbor with a nuclear arsenal that could destroy China in minutes. I would prefer a weaker Russia, governed by someone with more serotonin than Putin.

Yes, Xi probably likes the precedent Putin is trying to set, that of regional powers using force to subdue or absorb smaller neighbors. But he may be realistic enough to see that the effective “precedent” is how fiercely the West and Ukraine are resisting Putin’s invasion. What Putin is doing in Ukraine won’t help Xi with Taiwan—quite the contrary. Furthermore, Xi has been slow on the uptake during this crisis. He genuinely believed that Russia wouldn’t invade, or so he told American diplomats. And he failed to see the implications for his frequently used “national sovereignty” argument. If China supports Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—or even if it doesn’t oppose it strongly—then it loses credibility whenever it asserts “national sovereignty” in response to criticism of its Uighur and Hong Kong policies. What about Ukraine’s sovereignty, people will ask?

What could Putin give Xi in return for help evading Western sanctions? Rubles are practically worthless now outside Russia, and although China might like some cheap Russian oil, the risks probably outweigh the benefits. After all, the oil wouldn’t be free, and China can easily afford to buy oil on the world market without antagonizing the West. China doesn’t need Russian oil; it does need access to Western markets.

Xi might like to have Outer Manchuria back, which the Russians seized in the mid-1800s. This would include Vladivostok, but even proposing that to Putin would be risky. Right now, Putin doesn’t seem to regard China as a threat, but that could change in a heartbeat.

And of course, China and Russia are bound to have differences in the future. For example, China’s Belt and Road initiative implies a reduction in Russian influence in Central Asia and the Middle East.

But what if? What if, despite the above considerations, Xi does want Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to succeed? Why in the world would he want that?

There are three possibilities:

(1) China is a Billionaire State, just like Russia, and Xi and Putin share approximately the same ideology. This conclusion would require an explanation for the social and cultural differences between China and Russia—and for the fact that Xi himself seems to hold Chinese billionaires in low regard. However, despite their differences, Russia and China might be more similar than they appear on the surface.

(2) Xi Jinping believes that anything that destabilizes the West, that frightens Europe and humiliates America is a good thing. Here we trip over a contradiction in China’s foreign policy: China is a world power because of its manufacturing sector, but this sector is far too large for China’s domestic market; China must export and in fact it originally developed its manufacturing primarily for that purpose. So stable trade relationships are a high priority for China.

However, to distract the Chinese people from the severe inequality of their society, the corruption and lack of basic human rights, China beats a nationalist drum day and night. And this isn’t just for propaganda purposes; there is an argument to be made that in their day the US and the UK used their economic power to build global political and economic systems, and that China will inevitably do the same.

But that argument only works if you don’t look at the details. The British brought public health measures, education and a legal system that made commerce possible. They got rid of pirates and bandits, and they built railroads. Of course, no one wants to be colonized, but the British did bring a model of civil society that had some distinct benefits. If you think that’s a post-colonial rationalization, go ask the people in Hong Kong. The rights they attempted to defend against Xi were derived from the Enlightenment and from Europe, and if the gods favor their cause, they will seize those rights again in a heartbeat.

American hegemony wasn’t as hands-on as British colonialism was, but it emphasized free-trade and regional alliances, and in the immediate post-war era it insisted on democracy. So there were benefits, especially for countries was like Germany and Japan, where democracy hadn’t taken root before WWII.  

As an aside, note that Chinese manufacturing success was made possible by the American global system, which allowed more-or-less free trade between countries with different political systems.

The problem the Chinese have in building a global empire is that they have nothing to offer the people they are attempting to colonize. What are you going to give us that’s better than the American system?  Xi actually seems to believe that people want to be freed from the yoke of democracy and civil liberties.

Without an attractive ideology, the Chinese cannot build a global system of their own without destabilizing and destroying the existing Western system. If the Western system didn’t work anymore, then the Chinese system might become the only choice.

But destabilizing the existing global system can’t happen without destabilizing and weakening the countries that founded that system or which benefit from it: the US, Europe, Japan, and the rest of what we used to call the Free World. This is absurd: China cannot have stable trade relationships with countries it is attempting to de-stabilize.

This is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Chinese foreign policy. The Western global economy implies competition between nations, but not outright or covert aggression; there is an unwritten political constitution which everyone has to accept—there are limits. The West is now in the process of expelling Russia from the global economy because Putin doesn’t accept those limits.

Both Russia and China have treated that economic system as a given, as if it were a public utility; it’s not. It was created by the US and its allies to serve their interests after World War II, and it was modified to include Russia and China after the Cold War, again to serve the long-term interests of the US and its allies. The hope at that time was that Russia and China would be among those allies. But Russia and (perhaps) China don’t want to be part of that alliance anymore, so they can’t be part of the global economy, either. The logic here is not at all obscure—the West will not allow Russia (or China) to use the global economic system to destroy that same system. Lenin said that the last capitalist would sell the rope used to hang him, but that was just a joke.

The only way any nation can replace the current global system is to come up with something better, and China and particularly Russia have nothing to offer there.

(3) One of China’s long-term goals is to make Russia an economic colony. If this were a novel, that would be a good ending.

Seriously, Xi goes to a lot of trouble to convince Putin that’s not his goal, but of course the Chinese would colonize Russia if it were risk-free. But in fact the risks are enormous.

So, which of these explanations do I prefer? Although (1) may or may not prove true in the long run, (2) is the best and most direct explanation if Xi were to help Russia. Helping Putin has no tangible benefit to China—-it only makes sense as an anti-Western move. In other words, Xi would have to be willing to alienate his business associates in service to a nationalist “wolf warrior” policy—I might even say fantasy.

But helping Russia at this point would be another sign that China has misread the situation. Russia appears increasingly unlikely to win the military struggle in Ukraine, and it’s already suffered a bruising and perhaps decisive defeat politically and economically. The West has decided to erase 30 years of economic integration with Russia. We are now returning to the trade system of the Cold War, where the default was no trade, and any exceptions were all bi-lateral and carefully negotiated at the highest levels. Of course, there was always a bit of trade with Finland and other neutral countries, but nothing that rose to the level of global importance. And Western banks did loan the USSR money, even in Stalin’s time.

But no one will be loaning Putin money, and how would he spend it if they did? Russia can no longer do EFTs as before. The old system of allowing Russia mostly free trade and free access to global banking is dead. Remember those 16,000 Syrian mercenaries that Putin announced he was hiring? How was Putin planning to pay them? In rubles, stuffed in manila envelopes?

Most of these sanctions will be long-lasting, perhaps permanent. Prohibiting travel to and from Russia may be next. And then the West may go on an Easter Egg Hunt through offshore banks, freezing any account that belongs to a Russian citizen.

Nothing China can do will lessen the impact of sanctions on Russia in any significant way, because it cannot change the decision to decouple Russia’s economy from the West. For Europe in particular this is a matter of self-defense. If the Ukraine invasion hadn’t been vigorously opposed by the West, the consequences would have been immediately dire for Poland and the Baltic states and perhaps Romania as well. Would a NATO that didn’t dare send anti-tank weapons to Ukraine really fight a war to protect Latvia? And in that case Lithuania and Estonia would also be doomed and NATO credibility would be kaput. Then Putin would start putting pressure on Poland. And with every success, his fear of the West would weaken.

Xi has no doubt realized that some of what the West is doing to Russia it could also do to China if events took an unfortunate turn. Ending trade entirely with China would be difficult, but any significant reduction would leave a mark.

And cutting China off from Western capital markets would be damaging. China’s recent economic growth has been partly driven by building housing and a modern infrastructure, and that requires borrowing. Not all of China’s borrowing is from the West, but the loss of Western capital would be significant.

China is not accustomed to recessions. How would the people react?

Although China may well do the sensible thing, this crisis is sobering. Are unprovoked invasions the inevitable endgame of Billionaire Capitalism? Putin uses Russian nationalism, Xi uses Han nationalism, Trump uses white nationalism and the Saudis use extreme Islam—-in every case to unite their citizens against outsiders and to blunt any reform movement that might take inspiration from other countries.

But nationalism is built for war; it’s not good for much else. Putin’s Russia is the most fully realized Billionaire State, and here we are, watching the Russian army commit a hundred war crimes a day against the Ukrainians, a Slavic Orthodox people whose only crime is not wanting to live under Putin’s thumb.

Russia doesn’t need this war, not in the least. But a country kept at a fever pitch by intensive nationalist propaganda may come to feel that war is inevitable—even a great relief when it finally breaks out.

Nationalist propaganda, originally just a tool of Billionaire Capitalism, often takes on a life of its own. Propaganda is just a narrative, and we structure our lives around narratives; simply living without a story or myth is difficult for us, although it’s often the best path.

People have died for the sake of illusions, that is, false narratives. We may hope and pray with all our passion that the human race does not disappear because we believed nationalist nonsense.

In Ukraine, Putin’s army is shelling Kharkov and Kiev. Ukrainian civilians are dying beneath the rubble of their homes as I write. There is reportedly a hit list of pro-democracy Ukrainians.

In the US, QAnon fanatics heckled the President during the State of the Union this evening, as he spoke about his son’s death. Trump and Tucker Carlson defend Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The January 6 Commission continues to interview witnesses and review evidence.

Canada is recovering from a trucker protest funded by American Trump supporters. It is unusual for protestors in democracies to demand the resignation of the head of state, or to harass and attack citizens near the site of the protest. And I cannot recall protesters attempting to cause a recession in their own country, as the Canadian truckers did by blocking the border crossings between Ontario and the Upper Midwest, hurting manufacturing on both sides of the border.

Their organization was remarkable. QAnon, white supremacists and anti-vaxxers were blended together and funded by rich Trump supporters in the US. The Canadian government seemed frozen in place, stunned perhaps at the opposition to reasonable public health measures, and at the sheer un-Canadian tone of the truckers.

It did not resemble a normal protest so much as an FSB Staff College exercise. Even if the protest wasn’t planned in Moscow, the apparent intent was to de-stabilize the Canadian state.

The conduct of the truckers in Ottawa left a mark:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/honking-fumes-and-anger-mental-toll-from-trucker-protest-lingers-for-ottawa-residents-1.5801609

It may seem as though everything is going wrong at once; the world is suddenly chaotic.

I submit that the chaos is more apparent than real. All these events are tightly linked and flow from the same cause: Billionaire Capitalism, which is entering a much more violent phase.

Putin invaded Ukraine intending to de-stabilize and intimidate Europe, humiliate the Biden administration in the run-up to the mid-term elections, give Trump ammunition against Biden, and perhaps get a nationalistic bump from the Russian public. He may have assumed that four years of Trump had weakened NATO.

But the Ukrainians reacted as Republican moderates and Joe Manchin should have reacted long ago. The Ukrainians are fighting like men and women who know precisely what they value, and precisely what they reject. When I was young, people used to say, “fight like a cornered raccoon,” to describe someone fighting with strength beyond strength. But these raccoons also believe in something. They call it “Europe,” by which they mean democracy, education, a free press and human dignity. Also a class structure without kleptocrats, and a head of state who doesn’t poison people.

They don’t want Putin’s Billionaire State, nor Trump’s either.

The Ukrainian government opened up its armories to the citizens. On TV, I saw a statistician with an AK-47 on the streets of Kiev. Instead of going to work, he went to the armory that morning, picked up his weapon, and found a group of partisans to join. Such a man should be uniquely qualified to calculate the odds against him and his country, but he wasn’t in a calculating frame of mind.

Jung said that “God” is the highest value the psyche can encompass, and are there higher values than human life, human dignity, and the path of the spirit? Are we witnessing a theophany in Ukraine?

Is the Ukrainian resistance a turning point? It certainly is in terms of the world’s understanding of the threat Putin (and Billionaire Capitalism) pose. Russia is not just a semi-normal country with a mediocre human rights record. It is instead a threat to us all.

Nationalism is based on memory. “Je Me Souviens” is the motto of Quebec, and it might as well be the motto of most nationalist movements:

“Je me souviens (French pronunciation: ​[ʒə mə suvjɛ̃]) is the official motto of Quebec, a province of Canada. The motto, translated literally into English, means: “I remember.” It may be paraphrased as conveying the meaning: “We do not forget, and will never forget, our ancient lineage, traditions, and memories of all the past.”^[1]“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_me_souviens

The problem with “not forgetting” is that human memory is a slippery thing, and nationalistic memory is particularly unreliable; in the best case it is myth, in the worst paranoid delusion.

Germany was not “stabbed in the back by the Jews and the socialists” in World War I. Instead, its leadership made a series of strategic mistakes, culminating in the disastrous Spring Offensive of 1918.

Nor was the South a victim of foreign aggression in the Civil War; its slaves were not content, and its army did not fight heroically to the end. In late 1864, Jefferson Davis stated that 2/3 of Confederate soldiers were absent from duty, most without permission.

But nationalistic memory is not merely self-serving; it is false in a profound way, in a way that alienates us from our own existence.

Once my family and I went to a castle on the Cape Coast, in Ghana. This castle was used for the slave trade and was a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We took the tour. The horrors of the slave trade should be familiar to any educated person, but a forty-minute tour had the effect of intensifying those horrors to an almost unbearable degree. As we left, we struggled with our feeling that somehow this had to be made right. And yet, how could anyone make the slave trade right?

After a period of silence, my wife said, “their suffering was terrible, but it’s in the past. They aren’t suffering anymore.”

And that’s always true—whatever our ancestors suffered during the religious wars or slavery or the Potato Famine is in the past. Barring any metaphysical surprises, they are at peace.

Or, I should say, that’s almost always true, except in nationalist memory, where past suffering is permanent. In Serbian nationalist imagination, the suffering and treachery of the Battle of Kossovo (1389) never stopped—it’s always with us, like the Resurrection or the Fall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_Myth

When I say that the suffering of the slaves at Cape Coast is in the past, that is not to say that the past is unimportant or that the political and social effects of slavery aren’t still with us—they are. And an understanding of the past is important; in this case, the insight that New World slavery was a result of pre-modern capitalism is critical.

But nationalism and identity politics ignore the need for insight and see the present only in terms of past suffering. Identity politics would have us believe that without experiencing past suffering (through empathy, or something like it), we can only see our present suffering “through a glass darkly.” We are vaguely unhappy, dislocated, alienated—but we don’t know quite why. But then we read about the Middle Passage, or the witch trials, or the Potato Famine, and finally we know the source of our unhappiness. This past suffering has been sitting there all along, unnamed and unrecognized, like a Scientology engram.

But is this true? No, it is mostly false, particularly on an individual level. You might well argue that all these historic tragedies have contributed to the pervasive dehumanization of modern life, and that could be the case. But to trace our individual unhappiness back to a specific atrocity that occurred before we were born? The web of past trauma—much of it unrecorded—is too dense. Tracing present unhappiness back to a single event is like tracking a single scorpion across the jungle floor.

And if we could see past traumas clearly, if we could track that scorpion, what we would mostly find are the traumas—or everyday frustrations—of our parents and grandparents.  Earlier traumas tend to be diluted by time and healing.

It’s not through feelings that we understand the past, but through thoughtful study.

If an individual suffers intensely, from a serious illness, or hunger, or grief, and if they come to believe their suffering is permanent, then we easily recognize that as an illusion. No individual suffering is ever permanent.

But somehow, we believe that group suffering—historical suffering—is permanent; it is not.

We need to understand the past, but we don’t need to envision it or empathize with the dead. Our empathy and our visions should be directed toward the future.

In nationalism, the vision of the future often involves a final war in which the nation’s enemies are destroyed or overthrown. Identity politics, which is Nationalism Lite, has hardly any vision at all. Where is the vision of healing and reconciliation that we might have expected from feminism, just to take one example?

“Where there is no vision the people perish,” as it says in Proverbs. And where is vision lacking exactly? Wherever people cling too tightly to the past, to their prejudices, their unexamined beliefs, and their obsessions.

We cannot build a better future without a vision, and we cannot create a vision without summoning up all our imaginative energy, our finest hopes and ideals. As we do so, we will be truly alive.

But if our spirit is tangled up in the nets of the past, if we cannot let the past go, then the people will indeed perish.

A striking feature of American politics is the long-standing ineffectiveness of the Left. If we ask ourselves how the American Left differs from a successful left-wing party like the SPD (as discussed in At the Kroll Opera House), one obvious difference is the American Left’s unwillingness to form a coalition with Centrist forces. For example, the debate over universal healthcare never “gets to yes,” largely because the Left insists on “single-payer” healthcare as the only path to universal coverage. This leads them into absurd situations; for example, I used to get mailers from Bernie Sanders touting “Medicare for All – Single Payer” as an alternative to Obamacare. First of all, Medicare is an excellent program, but it is not single-payer; there are co-pays, and you have to pay for Medigap insurance.  Second, the majority of people who got coverage under Obamacare got it through the Medicaid expansion, and Medicaid is practically single-payer.

So, Medicare is not single-payer and Obamacare is largely single-payer, but Bernie said it’s the other way around, so end of discussion.

Will Bernie Sanders support Biden’s efforts to add a subsidized public option to Obamacare? Sanders can be reasonable at times, so we’ll see. It might finally dawn on him that there are many roads to universal coverage.

How did we end up with a situation where the Left refuses on principle any coalition with the Center? This is diametrically opposed to what the SPD did, where the key to their parliamentary success was communication with and influence over centrist parties on many issues. This isn’t a rhetorical question; it is instead key to understanding our historical situation. And I can answer this question, but first I must tell you a story about Texas, in the old days.

In 1972 I voted in a campus election, and one proposal was to fund the “Texas Public Interest Research Group,” or TexPIRG, designed to do consumer and environmental research within Texas to inform both the public and the state government. I pictured them doing research—for example—on safety issues in drilling for oil. I voted for the proposal ($1 per semester per student, tacked onto our tuition bills), and so did most of my peers.

In 1972, most students at that university lived on $200 per month or less, and many lived on less that $150. Minimum wage was $1.60 per hour, and many university employees made $6000 or less.

 There were about 35,000 students paying $2 per year, and a $70,000 research budget was substantial. The Student Union provided TexPIRG a free office, and they could have hired a full-time office manager for probably $5000 a year, and ten full-time researchers for $6000 each, with $5000 left over for office equipment and other expenses. (Of course some of the researchers could have been part-time). They probably could have used the university’s copy center for reports.

I regularly visited their office because I wanted one of those research jobs. The visits were always the same: there was a piece of notebook paper with “TexPIRG,” handwritten on it, taped on the inside of a small window in the door. The office itself was absolutely bare. There were no desks, no chairs, no people. The door was locked.

The fee stayed on my tuition bill for several semesters thereafter. The student union reclaimed the office after the first semester or two of inactivity—but not before the notebook paper turned slightly yellow and curled a bit; no one had ever turned on the AC in the office.

I lived a long time in Texas after 1972, and was active politically, and I never saw the slightest trace of TexPIRG. If they did any research, which I doubt, it never influenced Texas policy debates. If you search online, there’s supposedly still a TexPIRG organization, and maybe they do useful work; we live in hope.

The PIRG movement was a brainchild of Ralph Nader, who exemplifies Leftist intransigence and hostility toward the Center. In 2000 he compared Bush and Gore to “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” This might sound like the usual thing a third-party candidate might say—-George Wallace used to say that there “wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the two major parties—but let’s drill a bit deeper here: was it true?

If Al Gore had taken office in 2001, what would the Earth’s climate be like today? Would we have invaded Iraq? Who would sit on the Supreme Court? Other examples might be added, but clearly when Nader said there was no difference between Bush and Gore, he was wildly incorrect.

The 2000 election was immensely influential in right-wing thinking, because it demonstrated that a Republican presidential candidate could take office and rule with almost absolute power without winning the popular vote, passing one tax cut after another with no effective opposition. This seemed like a miracle of grace to many adherents of Billionaire Capitalism—-their greatest fear being an awakened democracy. If, as Cheney said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” then Bush proved that democracy doesn’t matter, either.

Although there were other factors in Bush’s victory, the most important was Nader’s candidacy.

During the campaign, Nader launched harsh attacks against Gore, most notably misrepresenting Gore’s environmental record, and he did not conceal his preference for Bush:

Nader often openly expressed his hope for Bush’s victory over Gore, saying it “would mobilize us”,^[52] and that environmental and consumer regulatory agencies would fare better under Bush than Gore.^[53] When asked which of the two he’d vote for if forced, Nader answered “Bush … If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win.”^[54] As to whether he would feel regret if he caused Gore’s defeat, Nader replied “I would not—not at all. I’d rather have a provocateur than an anesthetizer in the White House.”^[55] On another occasion, Nader answered this question with: “No, not at all … There may be a cold shower for four years that would help the Democratic Party … It doesn’t matter who is in the White House.”^[53]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#2000

Nader is not only an excellent example of Leftist hostility to the Center, he practically invented the attitude, and this raises a couple of important questions:

How did Nader become the leader of the Left, and why did he take such an oppositional stance against the Democrats, a Left-Center party which had implemented so many of his ideas in the Sixties and Seventies?

The first question may be puzzling to my younger readers—wasn’t Nader always an important figure on the Left? And the answer is no, Nader was never a Leftist, and by that I mean he never demonstrated against the Vietnam War, never marched against segregation with Dr King or even worked much with the early environmental movement, despite mutual concerns.

Nader’s thing in the ‘60s was consumer safety, and he did not want to branch out; he did not want to get wild; he did not want to get funky. The Sixties and Seventies passed him by, and he was glad to see them go. He was not part of that scene at all.

Nader became a Leftish presence through his tireless speaking tours during the Reagan administration, when the Left was at low ebb. He went to college campuses, talked about the evils of corporate power and the absolute necessity of a third party (led by himself) and collected a check for each and every speech. Eventually he not only became a leader, he re-shaped the American Left.

This was a catastrophe not just for the Left, but for America. Because Nader never had a full-fledged political philosophy; he noticed that corporate influence tended to corrupt government and his remedies for that were standard liberal measures: legislation backed up by new government agencies. But Nader himself was not a liberal—he was never a Democrat and as a young man he was a libertarian.

Worse, he never analyzed capitalism itself. He was concerned with a broad range of issues, mostly related to public health and safety, and he never saw that the common thread in all these issues was capitalism. He might have said the underlying cause was “corporate greed” or “corporate corruption,” but beyond these catchphrases there was no analysis; he never connected the dots.

In 1981 the long struggle against Billionaire Capitalism began, but there was no intellectual framework for the Left to understand what was happening. Marxism had never emphasized the mutability of capitalism, and it had failed to capture the moment during the Sixties and early Seventies. Marxist dogma could not describe any form of oppression that wasn’t economic, so the entire cultural struggle against Cold War socialization—materialism, the denial of nature, the loss of the life of the spirit, sexual repression—-was simply invisible to Marxist eyes. Imagine a revolutionary ideology that was completely unable to sense a critical revolutionary moment: that was Marxism in the ‘60s.

Marxism did however have a critique of capitalism, which was a start. But it had become Soviet dogma, and wasn’t fit for use in an American environment. But Marxism did demonstrate that Left movements need an analysis of capitalism, a vital point.

But in 1981 there was no one to make that point, no one to develop that analysis. Granted, there is an implicit critique of capitalism in American liberalism, but this critique was seldom made explicit.  Liberals of that era didn’t want to mention capitalism as a system, for fear of sounding like Marxists, and so they were rolled over by Billionaire Capitalism.

The ‘80s were a dark time for American Leftists. The country made a hard right, with destructive consequences for unions, the environment, civil rights enforcement, and government accountability. The Left naturally felt it had the answers to Reagan’s mistakes and excesses…..but no one was listening. There was no Left media, no leaders of any stature, and not even a common ideology.

Enter Ralph Nader. He had been a national figure for a long time, and was widely respected for his product safety work. Every time you put on a seat belt, you might have been reminded of him. He was a rare public figure who changed everyday life for the better.

And he wasn’t a Marxist, or even a liberal. Even Leftists saw that as an advantage. And it was possible to regard his lack of ideology as pragmatism.

And Nader was a good organizer, and he kept showing up.

That explains how he became a leader of the Left; the next question is, how or why did he develop such an oppositional attitude toward the Democrats, the Center-Left party in America?

Of course I will not stoop to psychoanalysis here, but I do believe that his lack of ideology played a role. In the end, what was the fundamental difference between Nader and Mondale, or Jesse Jackson or Michael Dukakis? If you strip away Nader’s aura of specialness, there wasn’t much to choose from in terms of ideology—they were all liberals. There might be differences of emphasis, but no one was suggesting changes in capitalism itself.

In fact, when Mondale said that one of Japan’s competitive advantages over America was that Japanese CEOs were more innovative, he went further than Nader, because Mondale was questioning whether the ultra-rich were earning their privileges, a veiled attack on the class system itself.

Nader had to differentiate himself, in other words; he obviously couldn’t let Fritz Mondale outflank him on the left. So Nader used what was at hand: his reputation for frugality and incorruptibility. He positioned himself as morally superior to mere liberals, especially those who had held public office.

There was of course no nuance in this position, and it didn’t take long for this branding exercise to degenerate into a Manichaean battle between Good and Evil.

What Nader needed was a way of differentiating himself on the issues, or ideologically, with a clear critique of capitalism, for example. But instead he used an assertion of moral superiority in place of something substantive. He used image instead of content.

Having achieved a position of leadership on the Left, and likewise having differentiated himself from leading Democratic figures, how did Nader use his power and influence?

First, there’s a long and unedifying history of Nader maximizing cash flow in his organizations; Nader worked on that a lot. I won’t go into detail, because charging $20 per head to attend his campaign rallies speaks for itself.

Second, Nader ran for president often. He was first mentioned as a possible candidate in 1972, but he didn’t actually run until a generation later, in 1996.

In 1992, of course, Ross Perot got 19% of the vote. Many Republicans believed that Perot threw the election to Bill Clinton, and although that’s debatable—-when Perot temporarily withdrew, the majority of his supporters switched to Clinton. But Perot’s candidacy did influence the Electoral vote; Clinton carried a number of states that Bush would have otherwise been expected to win.

Did Perot’s performance in 1992 influence Nader to run in 1996? Did Nader see himself throwing an election to the Republicans, as Perot was perceived as doing in 1992?

In the 2000 election, Nader clearly intended for Bush to win, as evidenced by his own statements; the excuses made for Nader are just different flavors of denial. Nader didn’t expect to win, and he was on record as favoring Bush over Gore—it’s as simple as that. Nader was acting as an auxiliary to the Republicans—that is, to Billionaire Capitalism.

But if you somehow believe that what happened in 2000 was an aberration, a case of a good man making a bad decision, then look at what happened in 2004. The 2000 election had been a catastrophe for the Greens, and they wanted no more to do with Nader. So in 2004 Nader was faced with the necessity of petitioning to get on the ballot in most states. The Democrats responded by challenging many of his petitions, either in court or administratively. And in several cases the Democrats prevailed. In Pennsylvania, for example, the courts found that 62% of the signatures on Nader’s petitions were invalid—they were “rife with forgeries,” as the judges put it. Really.

How did Nader respond to this? He appealed to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear his case. He didn’t fire anyone in his campaign, he didn’t launch an investigation or apologize—nothing.

Let’s quickly review the rationale for Nader’s candidacy. We start with his assertion that the American political system was deeply corrupt, and that only an individual of exceptional purity and integrity could make the needed changes. And this individual therefore forged thousands of petition signatures on his path to glory. Sounds like the end of the line for Nader’s movement, doesn’t it? And his vote total did decline by 84% from 2000 to 2004.

And yet Nader remains inexplicably influential. Sanders’ campaign in 2016 lacked any real critique of capitalism, other than the catchphrase “casino capitalism,” just as Nader used “corporate welfare” instead of actually making sense on the subject.

Sanders’ campaign was likewise built on Nader’s template of self-righteousness and extreme opposition to the center. The talk of a “rigged” election, of betrayal and fraud by the DNC, only laid the groundwork for later catastrophes, including January 6.

The threat to tip the election to Trump was front and center, frequently repeated by Sanders’ supporters and surrogates. Given what happened in 2000, there was real teeth in that threat. And there’s data to suggest that that might indeed have happened:

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds

In the end, of course, Sanders did support Clinton, perhaps a bit half-heartedly, but he was much more reasonable than Nader would have been in his place.

But the 2016 primary election didn’t have to play out as it did. There was another path, one laid out by Howard Dean in 2004. In Dean’s campaign, opposition to Republican policies was much more pronounced; Sanders hardly talked about the Republicans at all. And there was never any question that Dean would support the eventual nominee, and Dean’s supporters never threatened to sit out the election or support Bush—or Nader.

In the end, Dean had established enough credibility to become DNC chairman, where he led the Democrats to a striking victory in the 2006 Congressional elections. Without that election, and without Dean, Obamacare would never have passed in 2009.

There is a natural symbiotic relationship between the Left and the Center that Nader and his followers always ignored. Early in Sanders’ 2016 campaign he mostly talked about the issues, and Hillary Clinton was forced to follow suit. Sanders made Clinton a better candidate, and the Democratic Party a better party.

But when Sanders’ campaign lost its vision, so did the Democratic Party. Clinton debated well against Trump, but she had no way to counter Trump’s connection with the sour mood of the country; she fell back on “America is already great!” which definitely missed the moment. She needed the combative but idealistic Sanders—we all did—and she didn’t have him. She needed a sharply defined program of reform, and Sanders’ credibility behind it.

And if Sanders had been the SDP or Howard Dean, she might have had that.

Let’s pivot to what we can do. What would an effective left-wing movement look like in 21^st century America? Here are some points:

• We must always focus on the good of the people. Nader was willing to sacrifice the people in 2000 to teach the Democrats a lesson, to give them “a cold shower.” And some of Sanders’ supporters took the same attitude in 2016. This is simply unacceptable; this is how fascists or Stalinists think.

• Liberals and centrists must always be regarded as potential allies and recruits. And we should cautiously extend that to conservatives as well. We need to deal with our opponents with firmness and fairness. The world and time are vast, and enemies may yet turn to friends.

• Moral superiority is irrelevant, in fact it is often just a con. The only relevant moral political choice is whether we are willing to sacrifice to build a better world. Once that choice is made, reasonable people may well differ on the means to that end.

• As a substitute for content-free moral superiority, we should be perfectly clear about basic values: human life is sacred; human life comes from nature, therefore nature too is sacred; “man does not live by bread alone,” that is, the life of the spirit is profoundly important; the values of the Enlightenment are the basis of our civilization.

• And with capitalism, we need to make the case that capitalist socialization, while valuable economically, is profoundly destructive where there are no checks and balances to its power.

• We stand for free and fair elections, and an end to disinformation and intimidation in our political life.

• We need to be clear that we aren’t running for student council, as so many liberals seem to be. We are here to change the world, come what may.

Billionaire Capitalism is inimical to democracy, so scenes like the storming of the Capitol—and worse—will continue until Billionaire Capitalism is defeated as a political movement.

This isn’t about Trump. Mitch McConnell says he is devoted to the Constitution and free elections, but he’s either dissembling or suffering from cognitive dissonance; it wasn’t that long ago that he threatened to dismiss impeachment charges against Trump without debate or calling witnesses, on a simple voice vote! This was clearly contrary to the “original intent” of the Founders.

Furthermore, McConnell never opposed Trump’s false claims of electoral fraud or his efforts to undermine democracy until he himself was put in the position of voting for an absurdity: to reject certified election results from the states, results that had been exhaustively litigated in the courts. McConnell’s policy is to relentlessly undermine democracy while appearing to be a Constitutional purist—much like Alito or Thomas. The semblance and outward forms of democracy must remain, but Billionaire Capitalism must win nearly every election.

Remember, it’s been clear for four long years that Trump would never accept election results that went against him, and yet when Trump was impeached for abuse of power, McConnell was outraged. If Moscow Mitch had really cared about the integrity of the 2020 election, he would have gotten rid of Trump when he had the chance, and voted to convict him.

But maybe McConnell suffers from cognitive dissonance; maybe he thinks that billionaires can continually grow richer and more powerful while the Constitution still guides our politics. But as Woodrow Wilson said, “if there are men big enough to own the US government, they will own it.”

You might think that the storming of the Capitol was too stupid to flow out of an otherwise successful political movement like Billionaire Capitalism. Surely they must be smarter than that? But it was no more stupid than the Beer Hall Putsch, and the Nazis went on to destroy much of the world despite that fiasco.

More to the point, the limitations of Billionaire Capitalism are the limitations of billionaire socialization. Billionaires are not socialized to deal with any sort of resistance from others, and since they have no political principles (other than increasing their own wealth and power) they are profoundly clueless when dealing with people who do.

Having surrounded themselves with sycophants, people with healthy self-esteem seem like monsters to them.

In many areas of life, billionaires are profoundly clueless. When Trump disinvited the Golden State Warriors from the White House and singled out Stephen Curry as the cause, of course other NBA players pushed back on Twitter. Most memorably, LeBron James addressed Trump as “U bum.”

But what did Trump expect? Quite simply, he expected no resistance, because when billionaires humiliate people their victims almost never strike back. Likewise, when Trump incited the mob to storm the Capitol, he assumed—without thinking too deeply about it—that Congress would be too frightened or disorganized to complete the vote, that the storming of the Capitol would be as decisive as the storming of the Winter Palace, or the Bastille.

But of course the Winter Palace and the Bastille represented thoroughly discredited regimes, while American democracy retains credibility, to the extent that even those who attack it claim to be defending it.

Only when we think carefully about billionaire socialization do we see how catastrophic Billionaire Capitalism is and will be for civilization and the well-being of our people. The ultra-rich rarely deal directly with difficult truths, and so their reality principle is in shreds; if they want something, ordinarily it just happens. This socialization cannot prepare people to govern.

If Billionaire Capitalism triumphs, we will lurch from disaster to disaster, with a collapsing climate and plunging life expectancy. This will be due to their absolute incompetence as much as their profound indifference to human life.

An immediate example being Trump’s response to COVID-19. How many more such botched emergencies before America finally collapses?

I am writing on October 30, 2020. The US presidential election is imminent. The polls, which indicate Trump’s deep unpopularity, hang over Billionaire Capitalism like the writing on Belshazzar’s wall.

If Biden’s support on election day is anything like his support in the polls, he should win easily. He can only lose if:

1. The polls are dramatically wrong, or
2. Massive force is used to prevent or disrupt the voting or the vote count, or
3. The election results are reversed by the Supreme Court, perhaps piecemeal, by imposing voter-suppression rules that prevent the states from counting all the votes—or wholesale, by throwing out the results of blue states by whatever contorted reasoning.

The polls might be wrong, but they are as likely to be wrong in Biden’s favor as in Trump’s. The margins we are seeing in the best polls indicate a margin of victory of around 10%. The Democrats won the 2018 election by a margin of 8.6%, and that was before covid-19. So 10% is believable, and in fact the USC Dornsife poll shows a margin of 11.4% for Biden. The sample size of that poll is over five thousand voters.

https://election.usc.edu/

Force will probably be used to disrupt the election or the vote count, but it is highly unlikely to change the final result. Democrats are resolute, and it seems the majority of them have already voted. The Proud Boys have only a few hundred members, and attacking voters and election clerks won’t be a good look for them.

That leaves us with the Supreme Court. Could the Court give the election to Trump, on whatever pretexts?  Their legitimacy hangs in the balance, and if they’re smart, they won’t reverse the election, but they may not be smart. Supreme Court justices can make terrible mistakes; the justices who signed the Dred Scott decision believed they were ending the controversy over slavery, once and for all. They never dreamed their decision would trigger civil war.

John Roberts certainly understands the question of legitimacy. He consistently makes the case that the judiciary isn’t partisan, and whether you believe him or not—I don’t—he at least thinks that partisan judges are a bad thing, a point I appreciate.

Roberts notwithstanding, concern about the Supreme Court fixing the election isn’t mere paranoia. Here’s part of Alito’s opinion on the last Pennsylvania decision:

“It would be highly desirable to issue a ruling on the constitutionality of the State Supreme Court’s decision before the election,” he wrote. “That question has national importance, and there is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the federal Constitution.”

“The provisions of the federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless,” he wrote, “if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election.”

You see where Alito is going with this? He’s saying that because the U.S. Constitution specifies that state legislatures are responsible for arranging elections—and it doesn’t mention state courts—that the PA Supreme Court cannot hear a complaint that the legislature’s rules violate the Pennsylvania Constitution, which is exactly what happened. Because the PA Supreme Court didn’t just jump in and pre-emptively interfere with the legislature—there was a lawsuit. There is a clause in the state constitution that guarantees that votes will be counted, and the state Supreme Court found that the Republican legislature had violated that clause.

Alito is not saying that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court misinterpreted the state constitution or that its decision was incorrect in some other way. He’s saying that the State Supreme Court had no business at all hearing the case.

How wrong-headed is this? Let us count the ways. First of all, there are state and local elections on these same ballots. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court doesn’t have the power to review election rules for state and local elections, because the US Constitution doesn’t explicitly give it that power? How absurd is that?

Second, Alito is saying that no one can review the actions of the state legislature with regard to elections, because Alito’s argument also applies to the Pennsylvania State Attorney General, the Secretary of State and even law enforcement, if fraud or bribery is suspected.

In other words, when it comes to elections, there are no checks and balances within Pennsylvania. But every other power the state of Pennsylvania has is conditioned on fair elections and the legitimacy they confer.

Lastly, Alito is implying that federalism is dead. If the state of Pennsylvania cannot uphold its own constitution through its own courts, then it’s just a hollow shell; if it cannot guarantee fair elections using its own methods, then it is likewise kaput as a political institution.

What about originalism? If the Founders intended anything, they meant to establish a strong federal system, but Alito just tossed all that into the “dustbin of history.”

This is what is comes down to: for all the pious lectures we’ve heard for so long about the Founders’ intent and the sacred status of federalism in the Constitution, keeping Billionaire Capitalism in power overrides all that. Because if Trump is President for another four years, the billionaires won’t face a tax increase. That’s always the highest priority: concentration of wealth and power.

And Alito doesn’t even hesitate to throw federalism overboard to protect the billionaires. Nor is he alone.

In the end, I believe the people will prevail in this election. But the conservatives on the Supreme Court will do all they can to undermine the integrity of this election, even if they destroy federalism and the legitimacy of the Court itself.